Muso Musings: Fatherhood, Theory & Stuff
"T'is hard the kinds of Knowledge are but two,
The One erroneous, the Other true.
The former profits nothing when 'tis gain'd,
The other's difficult to be attain'd."
Abu Jaaphar Ebn Tophail's
INTRODUCTION
To the LIFE of
Hai Ebn Yokdhan.

THE EMPIRES WAR MACHINE

Marcel Duchamps Ready Mades.

Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (French: [maʁsɛl dyʃɑ̃]; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French, naturalized American painter, sculptor, chess player and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, conceptual art and Dada,[1][2][3] although he was careful about his use of the term Dada[4] and was not directly associated with Dada groups. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.[5][6][7][8] Duchamp has had an immense impact on twentieth-century and twenty first-century art. By World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists (like Henri Matisse) as "retinal" art, intended only to please the eye. Instead, Duchamp wanted to use art to serve the mind.[9]

Dada or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century. It began in Zurich, Switzerland in 1916, spreading to Berlin shortly thereafter.[26] To quote Dona Budd's The Language of Art Knowledge,

Dada was born out of negative reaction to the horrors of World War I. This international movement was begun by a group of artists and poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Dada rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality and intuition. The origin of the name Dada is unclear; some believe that it is a nonsensical word. Others maintain that it originates from the Romanian artists Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco's frequent use of the words da, da, meaning yes, yes in the Romanian language. Another theory says that the name "Dada" came during a meeting of the group when a paper knife stuck into a French-German dictionary happened to point to 'dada', a French word for 'hobbyhorse'.[27]

"Readymades" were found objects which Duchamp chose and presented as art. In 1913, Duchamp installed a Bicycle Wheel in his studio. However, the idea of Readymades did not fully develop until 1915. The idea was to question the very notion of Art, and the adoration of art, which Duchamp found "unnecessary"[31]

My idea was to choose an object that wouldn't attract me, either by its beauty or by its ugliness. To find a point of indifference in my looking at it, you see.[31]

Bottle Rack (1914), a bottle drying rack signed by Duchamp, is considered to be the first "pure" readymade. Prelude to a Broken Arm (1915), a snow shovel, also called In Advance of the Broken Arm, followed soon after. His Fountain, a urinal signed with the pseudonym "R. Mutt", shocked the art world in 1917.[citation needed]Fountain was selected in 2004 as "the most influential artwork of the 20th century" by 500 renowned artists and historians.[8]

In 1919, Duchamp made a parody of the Mona Lisa by adorning a cheap reproduction of the painting with a mustache and goatee. To this he added the inscription L.H.O.O.Q., a phonetic game which, when read out loud in French quickly sounds like "Elle a chaud au cul". This can be translated as "She has a hot ass", implying that the woman in the painting is in a state of sexual excitement and availability. It may also have been intended as a Freudian joke, referring to Leonardo da Vinci's alleged homosexuality. Duchamp gave a "loose" translation of L.H.O.O.Q. as "there is fire down below" in a late interview with Arturo Schwarz. According to Rhonda Roland Shearer, the apparent Mona Lisa reproduction is in fact a copy modeled partly on Duchamp's own face.[32] Research published by Shearer also speculates that Duchamp himself may have created some of the objects which he claimed to be "found objects".

READY MADE THOUGHTS AN EVOLUTION.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FP_Top_100_Global_Thinkers

Thought leader

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A thought leader can refer to an individual or firm that is recognized as an authority in a specialized field and whose expertise is sought and often rewarded.[1] The Oxford English Dictionary gives as its first citation for the phrase an 1887 description of Henry Ward Beecher as "one of the great thought-leaders in America." But it was revived or reinvented by marketers in the 1980s; in a 1990 article in the Wall Street Journal Marketing section, Patrick Reilly used the term "thought leader publications" to refer to such magazines as Harper's.[2]

Thought leadership is often used as a way of increasing or creating demand for a product or service. High tech firms often publish white papers with analyses of the economic benefits of their products as a form of marketing. These are distinct from technical white papers. Consulting firms frequently publish house reports, e.g. The McKinsey Quarterly,[5] A.T. Kearney Executive Agenda,[6]Booz & Co Strategy and Business[7] (now being acquired by PriceWaterhouseCoopers), or Deloitte Review[8] where they publish the results of research, new management models and examples of the use of consulting methodologies.[9]

A parody on the term was published in 2016 of Chris Kelly on Canadian television's This is That program. In the process of the discussion, imitating TED talks, Kelly elicits responses from the audience that exemplify the effect he describes as the result of applying well-known marketing techniques to achieve the impression of being an erudite speaker.[10]

Contrast this with Marcel Champs

“I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art - and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position. (On giving up art to play chess)”
― Marcel Duchamp
And
Duchamp's dictum, “It is the viewer [regardeur] who makes the pictures [tableaux],” would probably have been applauded by Baudelaire, who insisted on the active role of the beholder.´´
Baudelaire's Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the FlÃ¢neur and 19th-Century Media
By Marit GrÃ¸tta

or

“Beholder, wake up. Seer (and Apprentice Seer), stick out your thumb. Beholder, you may view the Seer’s card.”
From Bonus Pack 2, on Team Village
Normally, the Beholder and the Seer are on the same team and, like the Masons, can afford to have one party lie knowing other will be there to back them up. But this dynamic turns on its head if the Beholder sees that the Seer has been turned into a Werewolf.
http://onenightultimate.com/?p=275

And

Today, chess programs have become so good that even grandmasters sometimes struggle to understand the logic behind some of their moves.
Kenneth Rogoff

karelvan wolferen says

´´But it still leaves us with the puzzle of why Asians as well as Europeans, whose EU trade commissioners have been mouthing the same job creating nonsense around the TPIP that has come with the TPP, appear unable to tackle intellectually the dominant power aspects of these treaties. Perhaps because they exist in a world of their own that is politically sterilized by current economic suppositions. More generally, the concept of power (not influence with which it is often confused) receives a stepmotherly treatment in popular as well as serious writing, and the social science denizens of academia are entirely at sea with it. Mainstream economics is ahistorcal on purpose and hence has no room for power, which has helped continue the fateful division of political and economic affairs into separate realms for discussion that has long served the interests of power elites´´http://www.karelvanwolferen.com/49-the-predators-behind-the-tpp-14-oct-2015/

Wolferen has more to say , this for instance.

´´Since the political dimension to economic arrangements in the United States remains hidden in most discourse because political and economic reality are routinely treated as separate realms of life, few notice that what is justified in the United States by casting it in terms of the market at work, is frequently the result of heavy political involvement and interference. Politically well-connected American corporations, paying for the election expenses of Congress members who determine their fate, need not fear ‘market forces’. If the banks responsible for the credit crisis of 2008 and the subsequent world-recession that is still with us, had not been lifted out of ‘the market’ by the state, they would no longer exist. Powerful corporations have been allowed to swallow the state; they have as the power sensitive economist James Galbraith calls it, created a ‘predator state’, which they of course exploit for their own expansion. There is no frame of reference with which we can more convincingly define the TPP.´´

My today's list of Trump PROS AND CONS

I get a lot of heat for seeing positive signs in Trump. But I do. It's what I honestly see. I may be totally wrong. If his actual acts contradict the positive indicators after we have had time to see statistics, then I will certainly admit my error.

Why does Trump-hate have to be a religion that we all follow? (I reserve the emotions of love and hate for the people I know personally.)

I like Trump's consistent spoken messages about:

1. Wanting to get along with the emerging powers Russia and China. (link)
2. Wanting to move away from regime-change wars and globalist interventions (except to negotiate new deals to advantage the domestic economy). I like that he wants other countries to pay for NATO, because that will weaken NATO, etc.
3. Letting go of (accepting the resignation of) his anti-Iran maniac. (Trump keeps saying nonsense about Iran but hopefully reality will prevent an actual military intervention.)
4. Trashing of the CO2 nonsense and the drive for a carbon economy for the globalists. (link)
5. Constant and correct criticism of the corporate media.
6. Intention to economically and infrastructure enable the inner cities, to solve the social ills, he says. (However, this may well be just a scam...? link)
7. Disregard for political correctness. Much needed in the spiraling madness of "words that wound".
8. The fact that Washington DC hates him and all these insiders work against him.

I worry about:

a. His possible approach to Syria and Iran. But I think reality will prevent military escalation.
b. His treatment of Mexican immigration (and will it actually be worst than what Obama was doing? link).
c. What his dealings with Israel will actually be. (link)
d. His apparent lack of respect for international law! (torture, assassinations, whistle-blowers, economic sanctions, etc.) (and will it actually be worst than what Obama has done?)

But he has not actually done much yet. And good that his stupid blanket travel ban against 7 countries has been reversed by the courts.

Global Economic Model of War: Understanding Syria and more

The War Museum, Ottawa, Canada

Following a quick survey of macro-economic indicators which are readily available on the web, from such public sites as the CIA, WTO, and so on, one can readily posit a clear and predictive model of war. (All numbers in this article are expressed in trillions of US dollars, such as 1.0T for one trillion US dollars, as an amount, or as a rate per year, as per the context.)

On observing the planet from space (using a macro-economic telescope), the first and most glaring observation arises from a look at net exports, which clearly show a single and dominant global empire, the USA. It has, for many decades, had a negative annual net export, of -0.63T, or so — far greater than that of its closest "rival", and former dominant empire, the UK, with -0.14T. [1]

This means that US military projection (over 1000 military bases world wide) and power is such that the US can maintain steady and long-term extraction of wealth from the rest of the world towards itself, no questions asked. [2]

Only a country which is a participating satellite of the empire can share in the spoils of the global extortion project and consistently report a large negative rate of net exports. Notably, the UK (-0.14T), and France (-0.07T). (In this regard, it is no accident that the governments of the UK and France are the most willing partners in the US's present call to destroy Syria; more on this below.)

There are also momentary localized cases of large negative rates of net exports in post-war financial invasions, otherwise known as re-constructions financed by the empire (in the broad sense, including the financiers). But that is part of the accompanying phenomenon of how the empire profits from war itself.

The two necessary parallel instruments

For the system of extortion to function, the empire must maintain two parallel instruments: its military apparatus, and its financial apparatus based on the US dollar as world currency for the purchase of the main strategic commodity, which is energy. Only the empire can print the money that is needed to access the ability to develop or expand. A threat to the US dollar is a sufficient reason for war. Both Libya and Iraq had taken concrete steps to circumvent the US dollar as the operational currency, prior to their destructions. An attempt to circumvent the US dollar in buying or selling oil is an attempt to escape the empire's control, and this cannot be tolerated.

As long as the US dollar is needed to buy and sell the key strategic commodity, the US controls the relative value of other currencies, and as long as the US prints the money, it controls world finance and uses the global financial instrument to enslave all those without military protection, or without the sense to know better (i.e., jurisdictions with puppet leaderships).

Financial extortion is a tremendous tool. World national debt is 56.3T or so. [3] The US debt is only a fraction of this at 11.6T or so. Interest on the national debt is low for "stable" states protected by the empire, and high for "unstable" states being consumed by the empire. The world revenue from interest on national debts can be estimated to be at least 1T (per year), and possibly as much as 10T or more from all loan sources. This is comparable to or greater than the gargantuan world revenue from oil and gas, presently at 4.5T.

The evidence of history

Based on history, it is more than reasonable to posit that the empire's wars are driven by profit, that is, by an insatiable desire to extract as much stolen wealth as possible as quickly as possible, and to control territory to ensure continued extraction. Next, I examine the consequences of this assumption.

If the militarily superior empire is driven, as it has always been in terms of its military campaigns, by instant wealth gratification and conquest, then, in order to predict wars, we search for where wealth can be found and stolen. Wealth comes in many forms, such as slave labour, and natural resources, but one form is, more than any other, a strategic commodity: fossil fuel energy.

Fossil fuel - today's incomparale strategic resource

In the present technological and economic context, fossil fuel is incomparable as a strategic resource. It is the most accessible source of development and growth. Without it, a civilization slows and looses its ability to compete. Control energy supply and you control development. By cutting supply, you can bring an economy to its knees.

It is well known, for example, that the Afghan war is in large part about pipeline geopolitics, in view of controlling China's access to energy. To an empire, territory is important for two reasons: the resources that it contains, and the transportation routes that it sustains.

The Drug trade

In the case of Afghanistan, there is also the formidably profitable drug trade, now controlled (and, to some degree, exploited) by the empire. The world illegal drug economy is estimated to be between 1.5T to 5T (per year), comparable to oil and gas. Whereas these drugs are not a major strategic commodity, the empire must control the illegal drug economy in order to prevent any competitors or resisters from accessing the corresponding easily-earned mega-revenues. This explains the so-called US "war on drugs". It of course has nothing to do with US public health.

Non-compliant and counter-allied states

In a nutshell, in the empire's mind, non-compliant and counter-allied states, such as Iran and Syria, cannot be allowed to benefit from and to control significant oil resources, in an area where China could secure protected land access to these resources. The war in Syria is nothing if it is not a predictable march forward by the dominant global empire. The sectarianism on the ground is as significant a motive, from a macro-economic perspective, as the war propaganda spewed out by the empire's sock puppet politicians and disinformation media is truthful. Sectarianism without financial and military support on either side has a way of turning into negotiated accommodation.

War is profitable

In addition to its geopolitical objectives, war also has its immediate dividends for many in the empire. The destroyed territory (infrastructure, population, etc.) must be "reconstructed", as a compliant serf state, using the empire's financing, and re-building enterprises, all leveraged via the continued world pillaging elsewhere. The sick and dying or diseased population needs expensive prescription drugs, and so on. World spending on prescription drugs is approximately 0.95T (per year), and this is a major high-profit sector in the empire's operations. The interest rates on reconstruction loans will keep the invaded population subservient and exploited for decades.

The main high-profit services and commodities include: prescription drugs, illegal drugs, fossil fuels, ultra-cheap labour, debt financing, and so on, all related to non-essentials to which entire First-World populations are addicted. These economic areas, consequently, are represented by the corporate players that have the greatest influence within the empire, and that most generously contribute to political campaign funds, and to post-political lucrative prize-positions for former politicians and their family members.

Medium-profit economic sectors such as domestic manufacturing and services can hardly compete for influence, and have a much reduced voice compared to the industrial era. Behold the era of the US war economy empire.

Basically, the empire's behaviour is entirely predicted by a mafia economic model of geopolitics. To be fair, however, mafias have ethical rules regarding killing an opponent's family and such, whereas the drone-wielding USA empire has no such rules.

By comparison, from a macro-economic perspective, military spending in China (0.17T) and Russia (0.09T) is defensive against the military spending of the US and its client/satellite states — US (0.68T), UK (0.06T), Japan (0.06T), France (0.06T), Saudi Arabia (0.06), ..., Australia (0.03T), Canada (0.02T) — since their net exports are positive: China (+0.20T), Russia (+0.14T). The net exports of the US's main war partners are of course negative: UK (-0.14T), and France (-0.07T).

There can be no surprise that the US's most willing war partners will always be the UK and France. Such are their macro-economic structures. They have satellite war economies, a status Canada is working hard to fully achieve.

So What have the Europeans ever done for us?

´´The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore." He continued "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Suskind, Ron (2004-10-17). Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush. The New York Times Magazine.

THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE GAS RING. QATARI GAS, OR SAUDI HEGENOMY, TRUMP BACKS THE SAUDIS? TANGLED WEB INDEED
Tangled Web, Syria and Gas. Trump meets Egyptian President, that is a rejection of the Moslem Brotherhood, siding against Qatar in Syria and With Saudi broadly and therefore the ISIL Wahabbist and Saud…

Meet the Fuggers or, its the Money Power stupid. Brexit, The Euro and clueless Elites.

The Eastern Roman empire under Justinian saw the seeds of its final fall to The Ottomans when Abd El Melik started paying tribute in Gold coinage under his own Political Branding you might say.

With all the talk of Brexit being the removal of a final obstacle to the deeper federation of a European State transcending tiresome nationalism, perhaps a little review of History, particularly Monetary history, might not be such a bad thing.

In the review of European competences carried out as a consultation by the foreign office regarding Brexit and or reform requirements of the Eu, two of the papers need to be considered in the context of the Money power argument.

The first paper considered is the Subsidiarity and proportionality aspects of the Lisbon treaty and the competences of the EU institutions vis National and regional democratic institutions. This is a trade-off between Centralised Efficiency and …

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Living in Sweden with my beautiful Family Johanna my Swedish partner, Rhiannon and Rasmus our beautiful Daughter and Son.

I play guitar and study music and I am slowly learning to speak Swedish. Live in the Hallandsåsen Forest near a wonderful mountain Lake ( http://www.stugknuten.com/img/12269b.jpg ) In the Swedish countryside of Hallandsåsen.